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How to Look at Modern Art by Ad Reinhardt

Image | | Paul Greer


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“In this famous cartoon of 1946 Ad Reinhardt tried to encapsulate the essence of the artistic modernism with its history and inherent conflicts within the American context. The tree of modern art has its roots deep in history – the Greeks are here, and so are Persian miniatures and Japanese prints. The roots represent the four pillars of Post-Impressionism: Vincent Van Gogh, George Seurat, Paul Cezanne, and Paul Gauguin. The tree is burdened by the weights of “subject matter” and “business as art patron,” and a cartoon within the cartoon mocks the perpetual debate of representation versus abstraction. By juxtaposing business and art, Reinhardt aptly comments on the situation of the avant-garde in the United States, where the public and, more importantly, the patrons were rather biased against the abstract art, often calling it “degenerate” and “subversive.””

— (via)

on “In Our Time”

Quote | | Paul Greer

“I can appreciate that for specialists in whichever field it is that Bragg and his guests are tackling in a given week In Our Time must be a torment. Far from losing themselves in the amiable excursus, they presumably sit at home bellowing at their radios, furious at this irrelevant point, or that partisan analysis. But for us dilettantes, who have only flipped through ‘The Jargon of Authenticity’, and read Hashish in Marseille 20 years ago, while actually smoking hashish in Marseille, a brisk trot from Felix Weil and Carl Grünberg’s founding of the Institute for Social Research in 1923, through the formulation of critical theory, to the exile of Horkheimer and Adorno, the suicide of Benjamin, and Adorno’s eventual repatriation to serve as the Janus-faced figurehead of the 1977 German Autumn, well … it was exactly what I needed.”

— Will Self